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When the levees break Homes expand into flood zone. Day Two of a Three part series.

Published in the Stockton Record on 05/30/05

When the levees break - Homes expand into flood zone
By Hank Shaw and Dana Nichols
Record Staff Writers
Published Monday, May 30, 2005

Since the disastrous floods of 1997, local governments around San Joaquin County have approved at least 30,800 new houses in flood-prone areas, a Record analysis of property records shows.

Some are in new subdivisions. Some are expansions of older ones. Many have already been built, and their estimated value runs into the billions of dollars.

Even more houses are planned. Just this month, The Grupe Co. announced a proposal to build more than 7,000 homes on a Delta island that‘s below sea level. It flooded in 1983, reportedly after a ground squirrel burrowed through a levee protecting it.

Flood-prone areas meet at least one of several criteria: They have flooded at least once since 1862, are protected by so-called 100-year levees or are no more than 10 feet above sea level. At least two of the three conditions apply to most of those 30,800 homes.

Yet only 2 percent of San Joaquin County homeowners have flood insurance, even though experts say homes protected by levees are more than twice as likely to flood as to catch on fire.

“Most people do not comprehend the level of financial risk they face living behind a levee," said Doug Plasencia, an engineer and flood-risk expert based in Arizona. “You are talking about people losing serious assets that they might be looking toward for retirement."

Local politicians and voters get part of the blame.

So do California‘s insatiable housing market and the laws that preserve higher and drier farmland farther east. Even the very shape of the landscape — its vast flatness as well as the alignment of roads and rivers — has conspired to put family homes on the lowest, wettest fields of peat, mud and sand in the Central Valley.

Why they‘re here.

A complex combination of events has herded growth into the danger zone:

* Bay Area home prices are soaring above the reach of the middle class, sending home-seekers across the Altamont Pass.
* Some cities, such as Tracy, have restricted growth, which pushes development pressure elsewhere.
* Flood plains mean access to water, and that attracts potential homebuyers.
* East of the flood plains, laws protecting the Central Valley‘s lush farmland hinder residential development.
* Most importantly, the good roads and existing water and sewer lines lie in the lowlands closer to the Delta.

Most homeowners are only vaguely aware of the danger.

“It is something that is just there, and I don‘t really worry about it," said Juvenal Torres, an electrical worker who lives in Weston Ranch with his wife, Rosa.

“My parents asked me when we bought over here, Hey, you could get flooded.‘ I guess if it‘s going to happen it‘s going to happen," Torres said.

Weston Ranch Organizing Committee president Mitzi Stites said she and her neighborhood group are more concerned with schools and police patrols than flooding. But every so often, the waters flow into the forefront of her mind. Last month, local street flooding doused her neighborhood after a storm.

“The water was coming up onto my lawn," Stites said. “For that second you are thinking, My gosh, are the levees getting this full this fast as well? And, my gosh, I should be getting flood insurance.‘ "

But Stites hasn‘t yet bought flood insurance. Neither have many of her neighbors.

Legally, they don‘t have to, because the levee protecting Weston Ranch meets the 100-year standard required by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. According to that standard, Stites‘ neighborhood is not in a legal flood plain.

When 100 years isn‘t

Most levees that protect homes are strengthened to withstand a theoretical flood of the century, but that does not mean a house behind such a levee will be flooded only once a century.

Flood experts, such as state Board of Reclamation General Manager Pete Rabbon, say a house behind a levee offering this “100-year" protection has a better than one-in-four chance of being damaged or destroyed by flood over 30 years, the length of a typical mortgage.

That‘s more than twice the risk that the same homeowner has of losing his or her home to fire.

FEMA‘s 100-year standard is a mathematical best guess made by combining historic flood data with a guess on the reliability of the local levees. It has been expanded several times because the area continues to get bigger and badder storms, and it has its critics.

Ronald Stork of the group Friends of the River says the standard is too crude to hang so much on it.

“All this is very interesting," Stork said. “But what communities want to know is - is it safe to build here? Will this community survive? And the FEMA equation doesn‘t answer this question."

FEMA defends the 38-year-old standard. “It works pretty well," said Michael Robinson, a senior program analyst with the agency. He did say that with what flood analysts know now, however, it may be too low.

“In hindsight, it might have been better to draw it more restrictive," Robinson said. He recommended that property owners living behind 100-year levees buy flood insurance anyway.

Ron Baldwin, director of San Joaquin County Office of Emergency Services, would also like to see the standard raised. “No one‘s doing anything illegal," he said. “But I think we have a complacency about this 100-year standard that I really don‘t think is justified."

A true flood plain is simply an area that has flooded in the past — that means most of San Joaquin County, including Stockton, Lathrop, Manteca, Thornton and Lodi. As Stork puts it: “Flooding is God‘s way of telling you you‘re in a flood plain."

Much of San Joaquin County west of Interstate 5 is at or below sea level. And local rivers have spent the past 10,000 years spilling over the slightly higher parts of the county as well. Without a battalion of dams and a maze of earthen walls haphazardly erected along river banks over the past 150 years, the county would flood like the Nile Valley once did nearly every spring.

It is these levees that keep both old family farms and new subdivisions dry. And they do fail.

During the 1986 flood, a so-called 100-year levee broke in Yuba County, drowning a subdivision and a nearby mall, killing one person, ruining 3,000 homes, and causing $95 million in damage.

During the 1997 flood that inundated much of San Joaquin County, nine Valley residents died, though none in this county. The flood caused more than $2 billion in Valley-wide damage. The damage here was relatively low — just $60 million — in part because the flooded areas were almost exclusively rural.

That‘s changing. More homes are being built on flood plains that were underwater in 1997.

All of this deeply alarms state officials — who are already on the hook for $511 million in legal judgments against them stemming from the Yuba County disaster and a 1997 collapse — and has many flood-fighters frantically trying to convince their bosses that the threat is real.

“There‘s a problem with putting so many people behind the levees," Baldwin said. “It‘s only going to take one break to cause a catastrophe."

Local efforts

Dean Plassaras, a consultant working on the Spanos Park West development, said several other Spanos projects are protected by levees that offer 300-year protection.

He says they‘d rather be safe than sorry. “If you can do it, why not?" he said.

“When development occurs in levee areas, it forces the issue of upgrades," Plassaras said. “Once human existence finds itself in a levee area, now you need to protect lives. So the standards of protection and performance are much, much higher."

River Islands at Lathrop has gone even further.

Developer Susan Dell‘Osso said the project would encase 11,000 homes and 4 million square feet of business space within a fortress-like, 300-foot wide levee set back from an existing relief valve for the San Joaquin River called Paradise Cut.

Paradise Cut is normally a swath of dry land separating Stewart Tract from Tracy‘s outskirts. But when the San Joaquin River rises, its waters flow through the cut down to Old River in the Delta, reducing pressure on other levees.

Dell‘Osso‘s set-back levee would boost Paradise Cut‘s flood-relief power, and she says the levee itself would be impervious to erosion and burrowing animals — two common reasons they fail. River Islands needs such stout protection because the area flooded in 1997 and has flooded seriously at least twice before.

Dell‘Osso says the hoops state, federal and local officials have made River Islands leap through have made her project safer and stronger than nearly anything around it, a claim supported by several flood experts.

The problem, according to Eric Parfrey of the Mother Lode branch of the Sierra Club, is that River Islands‘ strength would exploit any weakness in downstream levees. Think of the armored island as a giant rock in a stream; it makes a flood flow faster around it. This added pressure could cause nearby levees — many of which are maintained to lower agricultural standards — to collapse.

“It just pushes the problem downstream," Parfrey said.

Dell‘Osso says their plan to increase the capacity of Paradise Cut would prevent that from happening.

Grupe‘s plan to develop Shima Tract with 7,000 homes, offices and stores relies on a 100-year levee.

“We don‘t think that‘s a problem. We‘re raising the levee where needed. The Delta islands are much more likely to fail," said Kevin Huber, the company‘s president.

When is enough

John Cain of the Natural Heritage Institute said even strong subdivisions can damage the system, because a levee break upstream relieves pressure on the more fragile Delta levees, which protect the water supply for 22 million Californians.

“When you build a development behind a levee, there‘s a lot of investment in that levee," Cain said. “So you‘re more likely for that island not to fail and for an island to fail somewhere else."

Cain, Parfrey and other critics of flood plain development say public officials should shift growth to higher ground in eastern San Joaquin.

Another idea, supported by state Sen. Michael Machado, D-Linden, is to encourage cities to grow denser.

This would reduce encroachment on sensitive land and create smaller areas to defend in a flood. But Machado admits the Legislature might not be ready for such a debate, so he has not pushed it.

Developers say building in flood plains can often be cheaper, easier and more profitable than building in the fertile farm country to the east.

“We would love to develop areas nearer the foothills, but then we have to justify why we‘re taking away prime agricultural land," Plassaras said. “If you go west, it‘s the Delta. If you go east, it‘s prime ag land. That‘s why communities are going north and south."

Contact Capitol Bureau Chief Hank Shaw at (916) 441-4078 or sacto@recordnet.com
Contact reporter Dana Nichols at (209) 546-8295 or dnichols@recordnet.com

PHOTOS: 1) Subdivisions sprout behind levees near Interstate 5 at Mossdale. Flood experts say this area may be most at risk for future flooding. 2) Paradise Cut carries water from the San Joaquin River, reducing pressure on other levees. The River Islands project in Lathrop would encase 11,000 homes inside a 300-foot-wide levee set back from Paradise Cut on an area that flooded in 1997. (CRAIG SANDERS/The Record)

PHOTO: Rooftops in Weston Ranch peek over a levee. Panicked residents of the subdivision snatched up virtually every moving truck during the 1997 floods, when Stockton issued a voluntary evacuation. (DAVID FINCH/The Record)

GRAPHICS: Flood threat: Most of San Joaquin County's population lives in flood-prone areas, but new development is pushing even further onto dangerous ground. Below are the major housing projects planned, approved, built or expanded in the county since the 1997 floods. (RICK HUDOCK/The Record)

GRAPHICS: Few San Joaquin County homeonwers buy flood insurance. (Source: Federal Emergency Management Agency; California Demographic Research; graphics by RICK HUDOCK/The Record)

INFOBOX:

Flood threat
Day two in a three-part series

Living in S.J. County means living with floods. But aging levees, shrinking maintenance budgets and booming population growth have combined to create an environment more dangerous than ever before.

Sunday
? Flooding and legal settlements have forced the flood threat into public view.
Today
? S.J. County is expanding into flood-prone areas.
Tuesday
? Solutions require cooperation among agencies.

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